Aspects of the Theory of Morphology

Igor Mel’čuk author David Beck editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:De Gruyter

Published:15th Mar '06

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Aspects of the Theory of Morphology cover

The book is dedicated to linguistic morphology and it contains a sketch of a complete morphological theory, centered around a discussion of fundamental concepts such as morph vs. morpheme, inflectional category, voice, grammatical case, agreement vs. government, suppletion, relationships between linguistic signs, etc.: the hottest issues in modern linguistics! The book introduces rigorous and clear concepts necessary to describe morphological phenomena of natural languages. Among other things, it offers logical calculi of possible grammemes in a given category. The presentation is developed in a typological perspective, so that linguistic data from a large variety of languages are described and analyzed (about 100 typologically very different languages). The main method is deductive: the concepts proposed in Aspects of the Theory of Morphology are based on a small set of indefinibilia and each concept is defined in terms of these indefinibilia and/or other concepts defined previously; as a result, logical calculi can be constructed (similar to Mendeleev's Periodical Table of Elements in chemistry). Then the concept is applied to the actual linguistic data to demonstrate its validity and advantages. Thus, Aspects of the Theory of Morphology combines metalinguistic endeavor (a system of concepts for morphology) with typological and descriptive orientation. It reaches out to all students of language, including the border fields and applications.

"Il reste que cet ouvrage d'IM, mome avec ses lacunes, dont l'auteur est tres conscient, et avec son lourd appareil formel, est une des pieces maitresses dans I'entreprise de restauration de l'interet pour la morphologie, et merite,a ce titre, d'interesser largement tous les linguistes."Claude Hagege in: Bulletin de la Societe de Linguistique 2/2010 "Die Belohnung kommt in Form neugewonnener Erkenntnisse uber die Vielzahl von unglaublich 'exotischen', 'bizarren', 'seltenen' und teils 'paradoxen' formalen Ausdrucksmoglichkeiten morphologischer Kategorien, die in den naturlichen Sprachen der Welt moglich und tatsachlich vertreten sind."Susan Olsen in: Germanistik 1-2/2007

ISBN: 9783110177114

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 1109g

631 pages